(Music Is Love) In Search Of A Word
by Nirav
Summary: The pieces of Beca that Chloe walks away with, the pieces she brings back, and the black hole in between.


This is a story about a girl.

One girl, any girl, every girl. Everyone has a girl who breaks them, who takes them apart piece by piece and takes a sliver with her every time she walks away. Even if it's just to go get milk at the grocery store, she walks out the door and takes a tiny slip of you with her, and it's gone as long as she is. If she comes back, it circles back into your orbit, but it's still _hers_ and just happens to be in your immediate proximity. The catch, though, is that the one time she doesn't come back, all of those pieces that she's gathered and held and brought back to cycle around your orbit, they leave with her. She's the real gravity tethering your existence, and without her, it all collapses in on itself, pressing and crushing and shrinking everything into nothing.

That's the thing about existing, skin and blood and bones and muscle. Skin cells die and disappear and are replaced, muscles stretch and tear and heal, bones fracture and splinter and grow back together, but ligaments heal like rubber bands stretched beyond their elasticity and bones will never be quite as strong after a fracture. Even when all the pieces are put back together after collapsing in on itself in a crush of gravity, nothing is quite how it was before.

* * *

It starts with a boy. His name is Calvin, but he goes by Cal. He's scrawny and weak, all pencil-thin limbs and head bobbling precariously atop his too-skinny neck, but he has magic in his hands and it flows out through computers and into Beca's headphones. His mixes are unearthly, a level of sophistication she can only dream of, and the only thing that comes close to listening to one of them is sitting with him as he creates them and _talking_ about them.

She's supposed to be going to the University of Texas in the fall, but her father is too busy on the east coast with his new wife and her mother doesn't take the time out of her pilates-based spiritual quest to find her newly-single post-forty self, so Beca just calls the university to cancel her admission and starts spending the time she's supposed to be in class in Cal's record store, listening and talking and watching and learning.

It takes a full two months of dodging her mother's drive-by moments of maternal love and her father's calls before they take a look at the bank accounts and realize that her tuition was never paid, and a week after that for them to figure out that she's not in school. Her phone actually overheats with the number of calls she gets before she finally relents and goes back to her mother's house. Her father is there through Skype, and they yell and barter and complain and yell some more. She sits quietly after arguing for an hour and waits until she's dismissed. As she leaves, they're shouting at each other about how she's been shacking up with some boy, and she rolls her eyes, because she and Cal are about as close to hooking up as her parents have been for the last five years.

After staying up all night mixing and mashing and experimenting with some tracks Cal had sent her way, she wanders into the kitchen for coffee and finds her mother still sitting at the table instead of at her sunrise yogalates class.

"Your father and I spoke for a long time last night," she says. Beca hikes herself up on the counter to reach a coffee mug in the cupboard and doesn't say anything. "You can have the rest of this year, but next fall, you're going to Barden."

"_Barden_?" She spits the name out into her coffee cup. "No!"

"You had your chance," her mother says shortly. "There's no discussion to be had."

And so it goes that she spends her first year after high school, ostensibly living with her mother in Austin but really sleeping on Cal's couch, mixing and remixing and _learning_. In August, her things are boxed up and her plane ticket purchased, and she flies east to start college.

* * *

Barden starts with a girl. She has angry eyes and a permanent scowl and a too-precise way of speaking. Then it adds her father, and she flees the room with her angry roommate just to escape his frustration and bad jokes and well-intentioned idiocy. After that, it's fresh air and too-green grass and people, so many people. Her iPod is dead, used up on the flight, leaving her headphones worthless around her neck as she wanders through the crowd to kill time.

Then there's a girl, the girl. At that minute, though, she's just _a_ girl, with red hair and wide eyes and a smile so blindingly bright there _has_ to be something wrong with her. Beca winces involuntarily at the cheer spouting out of this girl, looking desperately for an escape and finding one only with a mumbled apology and an "I don't even sing".

She returns to her room eventually, with her angry roommate and no one to talk music with, and has already forgotten about the girl with the red hair and the blinding smile.

* * *

She doesn't really speak to anyone again until one night when she's in the bathroom, enjoying the lack of a short-tempered roommate and anyone else, humming along as she warms the water in the inconsistent dorm showers. It's like just about any other night, until suddenly a girl, the girl—Chloe, with her bright eyes and bright smile, with her unnerving cheer and even more unnervingly attractive figure—is yanking the shower curtain back and accosting her about singing.

If Beca were one to think ahead by more than sixteen bars at a time, she might realize that this moment, this song, this girl, are when everything shifts. Instead, she just clutches the curtain to her a little more tightly and shrinks back a little bit more and refuses to admit that yeah, Chloe's right, they sound really, really good together.

* * *

The Bellas are basically Aubrey and Chloe and then Everyone Else, which means that Beca is sandwiched between moods swinging on a pendulum between uptight and bubbly, demanding and uplifting, determined and fun. Aubrey is a pain in the ass, but Chloe is the good cop who comes in to soothe the hurt—or, in Beca's case, the annoyance—and save the day, and Beca splits her time between snarking halfheartedly at Aubrey and shooting sideways glances at Chloe when the redhead isn't looking at her.

It's exhausting and confusing, this growing sense of wanting to be near Chloe's infectious brightness and needing to run from the burn Beca is sure will follow. Beca is dark rooms and headphones and building music out of the songs other people poured themselves into, and Chloe is stained glass and opera houses and throwing her heart into everything she does.

Her classical mythology class reads the myth of Icarus a week after Beca joins the Bellas, and she slips down in her seat in the back of the lecture hall, pencil tracing over the picture of a dead boy with broken wings and foot tapping in time with the melancholy minor chords echoing in her head. At rehearsal that afternoon, Chloe brushes past her in a pirouette with smile and a cheerful elbow to the ribs, and Beca flushes, hot and afraid, wondering how many times she can take it before her wings melt.

* * *

She throws herself into her mixes and Jesse's friendship and preparing for Bellas competitions and undermining Aubrey, because Aubrey and Chloe are best friends and even if Beca is convinced she's keeping her distance from Chloe, she can't help but interact by needling at Aubrey.

Eventually, though, it becomes less about that and more about winning, because losing isn't something she likes and Aubrey is driving them towards the edge of a cliff with a soft-rock lady-jam soundtrack that hasn't changed in thirty years. There are hours of rehearsals and fighting, failed performances, even a fistfight and jail and her father screaming at her.

Chloe has vocal nodules and spends as much time whispering around the hoarseness left from singing as she does actually singing. Beca focuses her attention on winning and mixes and anything but the way Chloe's hand curls at the base of her own throat tiredly when she thinks no one is watching, but her fingers twitch every time she hears Chloe's voice crack, her own throat aching when Chloe steps out of a rehearsal to rest and even Aubrey watches with sadness in her eyes.

There's a party one night, after state finals and Aubrey kicking her off the Bellas and Beca snapping at Chloe so childishly, and Beca is drunk. She knows better than to take shots, because she's the size of Tinkerbell and has an alcohol tolerance to match, but Fat Amy drags her into the kitchen with a shout of "Slippery nipples!" and shoves shots into each hand.

Two toasts and a cheap beer chaser later, and Beca wanders into the living room, warm and relaxed and enjoying the way all of the hard edges in her life look a little softer. She finds a vacated chair and is just sober enough to check and make sure no one spilled or puked on it before sitting down and watching the people dancing. The stereo is cranking out some useless, rudimentary remix of a useless, rudimentary top forty song, and Beca curls her knees up into her chest, resting her chin atop them and closing her eyes while her fingers tap out better beats onto her shins.

She's halfway through constructing a legitimately good version of the song when someone plops down on the arm of the chair she's sitting in and promptly falls down to squeeze in next to her. Beca jerks back, only to realize that the mouthful of red hair she has is Chloe, who's maneuvering her way around until her legs are slung across the chair, resting comfortably over Beca's.

"Uh, hi," Beca says, hands hovering out in the air at her sides. "Fancy meeting you here."

"You had that look," Chloe says, conspiratorially and heated and terrifyingly _close_. They haven't spoken sense Beca left, but Chloe doesn't seem to care.

"That look?"

"You know," Chloe says, rolling her eyes. Her hand is suddenly in Beca's face and Beca is too drunk to move, or maybe it's Chloe's fingers brushing at her forehead, from her hairline down between her eyes and back up again. "You get this crease in your forehead when you're thinking really hard. Or about to tell Aubrey she's a bitch."

"I never called her a bitch," Beca says, leaning back subtly. It's easier than acknowledging the fact that Chloe is sitting in her lap and touching her face, or the fact that she's hot and flushed and can feel Chloe burning her wings away, one drip of wax at a time.

"No," Chloe says. Her hand disappears from Beca's eye line and suddenly is on her shoulder, Chloe's arm wrapping around her shoulder comfortably. "Which is good. She isn't a bitch, she's just stressed."

"I can imagine," Beca says drily. She looks around the room to avoid looking too closely at Chloe, who's already too close to begin with. Jesse is across the room and his brow furrows momentarily, the cup in his hand almost falling to the floor, before he shrugs and turns away.

"But you had that look," Chloe says again. "You get that look when you're thinking, when you have your headphones on." Her fingers tap at the headphones still circling Beca's neck. One of her rings snags in Beca's hair momentarily, and Chloe laughs, leaning impossibly closer to see so she can untangle it. Air sucks into Beca's lungs and stays, her body frozen and jaw clenching tightly, as Chloe's hot breath beats against her neck.

"Got it!" Chloe says, triumphant.

"Terrific," Beca mumbles. She jerks in surprise when Chloe's hands are back at her neck suddenly, fumbling with the headphones. "Whoa, hold on, what are you—"

"You always have these on, and you're always making mixes," Chloe says, simple and distracted as she manages to get the headphones away from Beca's neck without strangling her somehow. "I want to hear them."

"You what?"

"Your mixes!" Chloe shouts, the headphones haphazardly covering her ears. Her breath is sticky sweet, like wine coolers and sangria, and Beca winces again. Chloe pushes at her shoulder. "Come on, play one."

Beca sighs, because she might be drunk but Chloe is wasted. She manages to get her phone out of her pocket without egregiously fondling Chloe's ass and spends far too long trying to decide which mix to queue up. She presses play and hands the phone to Chloe, letting her arm fall to rest across Chloe's shins. Her palm warms brilliantly at the feel of nothing more than a layer of denims separating her skin from Chloe and all of her bright heat, and Beca flushes even more.

It only takes ten seconds before Chloe is half-dancing in her lap. Beca lets her head tip back against the top of the chair, eyes closed, and permits herself a few minutes to enjoy the closeness. They're both drunk and maybe, just maybe, she's barely far enough from the sun to keep from burning away.

An hour later, when she's helping a sleepy Chloe into her apartment, though, Beca realizes she was never Icarus. Chloe kisses her in thanks, ostensibly aiming for her cheek but aiming half on her lips, and it's barely three seconds later that Beca is surging forward to kiss her full on the mouth, standing on her toes and wrapping her arms around Chloe's neck.

Chloe tastes a little like desperation and a little like apology and a lot like sugary alcohol, and it's about the time that Beca's back hits Chloe's front door and Chloe's hands brace against the same door while her body presses forward that it burns too hot and Beca jerks away. Words that don't make any sense tumble out of her mouth, slipping out past lips that still burn, and she fumbles with the door and runs, leaving Chloe confused and drunk and calling out after her.

She was never Icarus, because Icarus was just a kid trying to escape. She was Phaeton trying to pilot Apollo's chariot across the sky, brash and foolish and arrogant, burning fields and freezing innocent people and eventually crashing down into the earth, an explosion of light and heat and misplaced certainty.

* * *

She doesn't hear anything from anyone for weeks. There's nothing but extra time and grating silence and beats that don't line up echoing around her. She may as well be underwater for how muddled everything appears, and her chest aches from time to time, as if something is pulling it on itself, an implosion crushing her from the outside in.

She goes to classes for a change, even doing her homework in between building mix after mix after mix. Each one softer and more apologetic than the last, each built around the sickeningly familiar strains of _Titanium_, but as hard as she tries, it never sounds as like it did reverberating off of shower walls, smooth and cool like water.

Her phone vibrates one day, when she's in the middle of tweaking her thousandth edit the song, and it surprises her so much she almost falls out of her chair. Since Jesse stopped talking to her and the Bellas kicked her out and she ran like a coward from Chloe, she hasn't gotten more than a sporadic text here and there from Fat Amy.

She digs her phone out of her pocket and promptly drops it onto the keyboard when it indicates a text message from Chloe. The impact jumbles the entire mix, shooting painful feedback through her headphones and she nearly jerks them out of the headphone jack when she jerks back.

_Second place was disqualified. We're going to Nationals. Rehearsal this afternoon at 1:00, you should be there._

Her hands shake as she stares at the text message. On her laptop, the email at the top of her inbox is a purchase confirmation from Expedia, her flight to LA a week after the semester ends already booked on her own savings account. Directly below it is an email from Cal—scrawny and helpful and brilliant Cal—assuring her that his brother's late-night XM radio show is already interested in playing her mixes and that he knows a girl in LA looking for a roommate.

Her room is cold. Kimmy Jin has always insisted they keep it cold, and Beca didn't care for it until she crashed into the ground in a ball of heat. Ever since she burst back into the room all those weeks ago, breathless and still brutally overheated from Chloe, she's appreciated the cold air blasting out of the vents. Suddenly, though, it's freezing. She shivers, fingers hovering over the phone as she glances at the clock.

She has an hour. Shivering again, she mumbles a curse at her absent roommate's climate proclivities and grabs her towel and shower caddy, practically sprinting down the hallway to the bathroom.

* * *

Rehearsals leading up to Nationals are so extensive that suddenly the thought of sleep is so foreign that even considering talking to—apologizing, explaining, _begging_—Chloe is impossible. Beca finds herself spending an uncomfortable amount of time alone with Aubrey, building and rebuilding and fixing the arrangements. Chloe is nowhere to be seen outside of rehearsals, relearning her voice following her surgery, and Beca is swept into a whirlwind of planning and composing and choreographing.

Aubrey stops in the middle of a run through of the opening one day, when it's just the two of them. Beca freezes, pitch pipe still in hand, and eyes her guardedly. Aubrey is about as predictable as a ferret full of caffeine, and they can work together now towards a common goal, but she still terrifies Beca.

"Chloe tells me everything," Aubrey says abruptly. She silences Beca pre-emptively, before Beca even knows what she's opening her mouth to say, with nothing more than a hand held out in front of her. "We've been friends since the ninth grade. Family and school and singing and sports, boyfriends, girlfriends—she's told me _everything_ for the last eight years."

She regards Beca cagily, hands on her hips, and Beca twitches, instinct telling her to shrink away and run.

"She tells me everything," Aubrey repeats. "Except what happened with you two. She won't say a word about it, even to me, and I know that means something, but she's been different." She steps forward, crowding into Beca's personal space and staring her down coolly. "Whatever you did that left her not speaking, that made her decide to get that surgery, that left her playing that _stupid_ David Guetta song on repeat all the time, you fix it. You fix it, or I will come after you."

"But Nationals—"

"Fix it!" Aubrey says shrilly.

"Okay!" Beca scrambles back, half-tripping over her own feet. "I will!"

* * *

She doesn't, though. Not until Nationals are on them, because Aubrey is disturbingly single-minded sometimes and even her best friend gets trumped by Nationals sometimes. They made it, and they're something new and different, and they're going to do so well, Beca knows, as she watches Jesse and the Trebles step out onto the stage. They're good, but the Bellas are going to be better. She smirks from her spot in the wings, the microphone a comforting weight in her hands.

There's a soft sound floating around behind her. Beca turns, one eye still on the stage as the volume picks back up, and sees Chloe sitting on a spare speaker, turning her microphone in her hands and singing softly to herself with her eyes shut.

Beca turns around the rest of the way and nearly screams. Aubrey is standing half in the shadows, arms crossed as she glares pointedly at Beca. Beca glares right back, rolling her eyes darkly and shooing her away. Chloe is still between them, silent and unaware, as Jesse and the Trebles build up the crowd.

Aubrey disappears, and Beca steps quietly over to the surprisingly quiet nook Chloe is sitting in. "Hi," she says awkwardly.

Chloe jumps, a squeak that's more adorable than it really needs to be escaping her lips, and Beca smiles softly.

"Hi," Chloe says. Beca shuffles her feet, fiddling with the mic in her hands.

"Here," she says suddenly, yanking her phone out of her pocket and handing it to Chloe.

"Okay," Chloe draws out, confusion dripping from her voice. "Why are you giv—"

"Wait!" Beca yanks the phone back into her own hands. She blushes brilliantly at her ridiculous behavior and busies herself with unlocking the screen and thumbing through the playlists she has until she finds the one she's looking for.

"Here," she says again, taking a deep breath. She holds the phone out for Chloe to look at and counts the seconds in her head as Chloe stares at the screen, at the playlist labeled simply as _C_, at the fact that it's literally nothing but the 47 remixes of _Titanium_ the Beca build and rebuilt and obsessed over in the weeks since she kissed Chloe and ran away.

"That's my lady jam," Chloe breathes out dumbly, and Beca, God help her, giggles.

"Something like that," she says, shy and back to shuffling her feet. She pockets the phone again, fingers clasping at the microphone so she doesn't do something stupid like grab onto Chloe's hand and burn herself to the ground again.

"Are you—"

"I'm sorry," she interrupts again. "For everything. For screwing with the Bellas and for being a bitch to your best friend and for getting put in _jail_ and for running away and being an emotional ingrate." Her voice cracks the tiniest bit and she chances a look into Chloe's eyes. Her body warms under the brightness growing in Chloe's eyes, but it doesn't burn at all.

Fat Amy appears abruptly, yanking them both by the arm and telling them to continue their lesbian lovefest after the show. Chloe says something indignant and cheerful, and pauses to smile softly at Beca and grip her forearm for the briefest of moments before they move to their marks on the stage.

They are brilliant. Even the Trebles are cheering for them. They're practically invincible—bulletproof, maybe—and nothing has ever felt so good as when every note, every step of the choreography, is hit perfectly.

Except, maybe when Chloe pulls her away from the others backstage and presses her against a wall. Beca is up on her toes with her arms around Chloe's neck and Chloe's kiss is hot and sweet, but it doesn't taste like sugary and alcohol and it doesn't burn at all.

"I'm graduating soon," Chloe mumbles against Beca's lips when she pulls back for air.

"I'm not staying here," Beca says. She kisses Chloe again. "I leave for LA a week after the semester ends, I already have a station lined up out there that wants me to make mixes for them."

"Oh, really," Chloe drawls. Her fingers are tight around Beca's hips. "I'm starting a job in San Diego. It's only a few hours apart."

"Might be a good thing," Beca says with a smirk. "A bit of distance might keep you respectable."

"Well, I did already see you naked," Chloe says, punctuating the final word with a wink that's far too lascivious to be allowed anytime people are within a thousand-foot radius.

Beca doesn't say anything, but just pulls her closer. Chloe's hands slide up to her shoulder blades and pull her impossibly closer, forehead falling to rest on Beca's shoulder. Somewhere they're being announced as national champions, but her head is already in California and a new remix of _Titanium_. There's nothing but heat and comfort and music, and she tightens her grip on Chloe.

* * *

A few years later, when her parents have finally accepted that making moderate amounts of money doing what she loves is better than her being forced through a college degree she has no interest in, when Chloe has transferred to the Los Angeles office, when they've had their big fights and petty disagreements, Beca sells one of her mixtapes to some producer or another. He gets it into a movie, and the movie makes enough money to buy the moon and a maybe Hawaii as well, and Beca winds up depositing a check for an ungodly amount of money.

She walks into their apartment to see Chloe dancing around the living room to bad turn-of-the-century pop in her best Risky Business impression, sunlight filtering into the room through the grossly large windows that Chloe loves so much. Beca leans back against the door behind her, arms folded across her chest, and watches as Chloe belts out the chorus to _Story of a Girl._

It started with a boy, but really, it was all about one girl, every girl, any girl. The girl, and the splinters and slivers of Beca she took with her every time she walked out the door to go to work, or the grocery store, or a movie, and the pieces she brought back every time, without fail. The weeks in which Beca was burned and broken and alone—the Icarus weeks, she considers them silently, though she'd never in a thousand years say as much to anyone about that—left a piece missing forever, that even Chloe couldn't bring back.

But really, the fact that Chloe is dancing around their apartment in her underwear and button down, singing _I absolutely love her when she smiles_ and pirouetting over to where Beca stands, makes the fact that she'll never be quite the same completely worth it.


End file.
